David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.